Founder · Letter

Adam Swenson

Founder & CEO · Zovos AI

Zovos started with a simple observation. Some of the sharpest risk and compliance teams I knew were being slowed down by a fragmented stack. The industry has been overdue for one affordable platform, assisted by agents that read regulatory change the way practitioners do.

AUSTIN, TX

PortraitAdam SwensonRoleFounder & CEO

The story · 01

I have spent my career inside regulated institutions. I built control frameworks, audited them, and answered for them in examinations. The charters and sizes were different. The broken pattern was the same.

A new examiner letter lands on a Friday. By Monday morning the compliance team is rebuilding a spreadsheet, calling a consultant, and forwarding a PDF of a PDF to a policy author who will rewrite three paragraphs by hand. The institution is paying for a separate system for nearly every part of the program: GRC, policy management, framework crosswalks, third-party risk, AML/CFT, model governance, internal audit, exam management, board reporting, and a regulatory newsletter on top. None of them talk to each other. All of them bill separately.

The rule changed in real time. The compliance stack did not.

I know exactly what it costs to close that gap by hand, because I have done it. I have rewritten a bank's security policies, standards, and control objectives nearly end to end, and carried its maturity rating through a long climb. The writing was never the hard part. The hard part was knowing what a changed rule touched: which policy, which control, which finding. And that was with a full security office behind it.

A small compliance team cannot absorb that kind of effort, and neither can a large bank's second line when the rules move every quarter. Zovos exists for both. It is one system for the whole program: compliance, exams and regulatory change, AML/CFT and fraud, enterprise and third-party risk, cybersecurity, model and AI governance, credit risk review, internal audit, and board reporting, all built on one shared library of frameworks, controls, and policies. Agents assist across all of it. They read regulators the way a senior CCO would and propose the library changes the moment a paragraph moves, and your team reviews and approves every one. By the time the examiner asks, the answer is already written, cited, and signed.

We build for the community-bank CCO who knows every customer's name, the credit-union risk lead who got the job because she ran every audit by hand, the enterprise AML/CFT officer staring at a stack of state-by-state addenda. You should not need a consulting firm and four SaaS contracts to know what the rules of your own industry require of you.

If that sounds familiar, write me directly at adam@zovos.ai. I read every note.

Operating principles · 02

Six things we will not compromise on.

P / 01

Cited or it didn't happen

Every claim Zovos surfaces points back to the regulator paragraph and version that produced it. That holds for every policy line, every control mapping, and every issue. Auditors get receipts, and teams get trust.

P / 02

One system, not a suite

A separate tool for each part of the program is the problem, not the solution. We will not ship disconnected modules that pretend to be a platform. Frameworks, controls, policies, findings, and every program built on them live in one system, because quality starts to slip the moment they are split apart.

P / 03

Built for institutions of every size

Community banks and credit unions deserve the same nervous system the largest banks build internally, and large institutions deserve one that does not take a year to stand up. We build it to serve the four-person compliance team and the four-hundred-person operation alike.

P / 04

Agents, but accountable

Agents draft, map, and surface. People approve, attest, and own the result. We will never ship a workflow that asks an examiner to trust a model output without a human signature on the line.

P / 05

The rule is the source

We ingest regulators directly: the Federal Register, OCC, FDIC, NCUA, CFPB, the Fed, FinCEN, and the state regulator in nine charter states. There is no middleman, no reformatted newsletter, and no consultant interpretation between you and the paragraph.

P / 06

Two-week onboarding or it doesn't ship

If a CCO can't bring their existing library, audit history, and policies into Zovos in two weeks, the product is broken. We benchmark every release against that line.

The arc · 03

2011

Service first

I spent four years as a U.S. Air Force aerospace medical technician, working emergency medicine, code response, and trauma care. It was the first place I learned that a disciplined checklist is what keeps a bad day survivable. I finished a computer networks and security degree while serving.

2015

Building the infrastructure

I did security engineering from bare metal: SOC and SIEM builds, cloud, identity, and encryption, along with audits against PCI-DSS and HIPAA. The same controls look very different from the building side and the audit side.

2017

The audit seat

I moved to risk-based IT audit at a Fortune 50 company, reporting to the board and CEO. I covered enterprise infrastructure, the SDLC, and application security. The lasting lesson was how much of compliance is reconstructing answers that should already exist.

2018

Rebuilding a regional bank's control framework

I spent five years as senior principal cybersecurity architect at a regional bank with $700 billion in assets under management. I rewrote nearly all of the security policies, standards, and control objectives, carried the bank's cybersecurity maturity rating through a long climb, and advised the operating committee and the board on technology strategy.

2023

Two trillion dollars in scope

I was head of cybersecurity for U.S. wealth management at the largest US bank, a two-trillion-dollar business, alongside principal security-architecture duties across the firm. That work included integrating an acquired bank, product security for a next-generation core-banking platform, and independent reviews of the firm's biggest incidents. The control overhauls earned the only satisfactory rating in a horizontal technology audit across the lines of business.

2025

AI at enterprise scale

As head of AI and engineering at a national bank, I founded the enterprise AI program and shipped an internal AI platform used across the bank. The OCC screened it in an informational audit session. That was proof that agentic systems can clear bank-grade security and governance bars.

Q1 2026

Zovos founded

I founded Zovos in Austin, Texas. A decade of building, auditing, and answering for control frameworks had become a conviction. Agents can read regulators the way practitioners do, as long as one system holds the whole picture.

Q4 2026

One system, working

The whole program now sits on one graph: compliance, risk, AML/CFT, cybersecurity, audit, and board reporting, on one shared library of frameworks, controls, and policies. It is built, tested nightly, and being readied for its first institutions. This page exists because the work is real.

Building something here? Write me directly.

I read every note from a CCO, risk lead, or AML/CFT officer. Whether you work at a community bank, credit union, or national institution, you will usually hear back within the same week.

adam@zovos.ai →See the product